


Day 17: Christmas without you

by ConsultingPurplePants



Series: 25 Days of Fic-Mas (originally posted to tumblr) [17]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, M/M, Pre-Slash, army John, basically they should never have Christmas without each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 07:54:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5449016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConsultingPurplePants/pseuds/ConsultingPurplePants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a good thing Sherlock and John met.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Day 17: Christmas without you

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize in advance.

John smacks Bill on the back firmly as he chokes on an overly-enthusiastic swig of beer, and several just-past-tipsy off-duty soldiers laugh raucously when Bill sprays out a mouthful of his drink. John, not particularly sober himself, roars with laughter when Bill turns towards him, red as anything, with beer dripping down his chin.

“Ta, Watson!” he pants, his body desperate for the oxygen he wasted by nearly filling his lungs with beer.

“No worries,” John responds, still laughing into his own drink.

All around them, the mess hall is full of the soldiers who were lucky enough not to be on patrol tonight. Everyone is tipsy and smiling, and even though they’re surrounded by sand, it’s still Christmas Eve. John is riding on the coat tails of an adrenaline high from earlier that afternoon, when he had actually held a soldier’s heart in his hands on the battle field and still managed to save his life. His blood is singing with his achievement, and the beer is definitely helping him along.

Suddenly, the area near the door goes quiet. John cranes his neck to get a look at who just walked in, and sits down heavily when he does. Major Sholto may have authorized this party, but he’s an incredibly serious man and even John doesn’t know if he’s going to be all right with just sitting down amongst the soldiers and having a pint. He pushes up onto the tips of his combat boots to see what’s going on around the entrance, and catches Sholto’s eye. Sholto nods at him, then starts to walk over to John’s group, where Bill still hasn’t quite recovered his normal skin colour.

“Captain,” Sholto greets him, and John automatically salutes him. A couple of soldiers behind Bill elbow each other and snigger, but a quick glare from Sholto shuts them up immediately.

“Having a good time?” he continues.

John nods, slowly. “Yes, sir.”

Sholto looks around at the rest of the group, as if seeing them for the first time. Everyone gives slightly off-kilter salutes, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Sholto helps himself to a pint and leans back in one of the rickety chairs, glancing around, and the party goes back to its loud raucousness as if nothing had happened. John looks around, feeling perfectly at home. He’s surrounded by a brotherhood of patriotic adrenaline junkies who have become a family to him, and he couldn’t be any more comfortable than he is right now. He’s jolted out of his thoughts by someone standing up and shouting for attention, and then, just like every time they get to drinking, a familiar conversation starts up within the group.

“What’re you lot gonna be doing next Christmas, then?” slurs a plastered lieutenant off to John’s left.

He is answered by a cacophony of equally-slurred voices, each shouting over the other to be heard. John hears snippets of _I’ll start a family_ and _I’ll go home to my missus_ , interspersed with the occasional yell of _I’ll get the fuck back here as soon as fucking possible_. John sits back in his own rickety chair and glances over at Sholto to see if he’s got an answer for them, but Sholto isn’t looking at the soldiers. He’s giving John a rather heated look, and John knows exactly what’s coming next. He chugs the last of his beer and tries to look surprised as Sholto stands up.

“Captain, can I talk to you in my quarters, please? I’ve just remembered something important.” He strides out of the room, clearly expecting John to follow.

With Sholto out of earshot, the elbows and nudges and sniggers get significantly louder. John gives them the two-fingered salute as he walks out of the mess after Sholto.

His quarters aren’t too far from the mess hall. When John walks in, he finds him gazing thoughtfully at the calendar above his desk: December 2008.

“James? What’s wrong?” Sholto startles and turns around, as if he hadn’t heard John walk in.

“Nothing, John. Just…” He takes a step towards him and gently runs his hand along John’s jaw.

John makes sure the door is closed and locked before he tilts his face up to accept the kiss. It’s soft and lingering, and completely unlike their usual intense, heated encounters. John pulls back and looks into clear blue eyes.

“Are you sure everything’s all right?”

Sholto shakes his head, then pulls John close. They stand like that, listening to the party roaring down the hall, until Sholto whispers into the top of John’s head, “You didn’t answer in the mess. Where will you be next Christmas, John?”

And John grins widely up at him as he replies, “Right here. Where else would I possibly be, James?”

***

Sherlock hisses in pleasure as the needle punctures his skin, the rush of endorphins nearly immediate now. He collapses backwards on his filthy sofa, waiting for his 7% solution to kick in and for everything to become crystal clear. Everything just goes _so slowly_ without it, everyone crawling by like ants, even his great brain reduced to so many rusty gears. He settles in to wait.

A sharpness starts to trickle in through his peripheral vision, so subtly he almost doesn’t notice it at first. But ah, there it is. He can feel the connections shooting through his brain, his mind lit up like a Christmas tree. Rather like the small table top one his infuriatingly dull landlord had insistently placed there, protesting something along the lines of, “But it’s Christmas, Mr. Holmes!”

But enough of that, he’s not about to waste this perfectly good class A substance on thinking about something so trivial. He concentrates on sorting through his mind palace; he hasn’t had any cocaine in so long, the rooms have become rather messy. He darts around in his mind, clearing cobwebs off memories and rooms that he’d nearly forgotten he’d had. Apparently the stupid Christmas tree is making him nostalgic. He’s just clearing off a desk in the anatomy wing when he hears a sound outside and freezes.

This is the one problem with the cocaine; he can’t seem to differentiate between his mind palace and this tiny grubby flat he’s managed to obtain without Mycroft noticing. He cracks open his eyes and takes a quick glance around, the lights on the Christmas tree suddenly much too bright for his dilated pupils. He staggers to the window to get a look outside and finds the source of the noise. There is a couple standing below his window, and the woman has just dropped her phone in the snow with a shriek, and the man is there with his arm around her, trying to comfort her. Whispers of _I love you, it’s going to be all right, I’ll get you a new one for Christmas_ reach his ears, and he feels his fury all the way to his toes, magnified by the drug.

_Love_. No one, his mother excluded of course, had ever felt it for him, and he was still alive, wasn’t he? Everyone with their declarations and rejections and heartbreak, how did they function? It seems like the last thing he could ever consider conducive to brainwork, unlike the cocaine, and he simply doesn’t understand why people go in for that sort of thing.

He groans, collapsing back onto the sofa. Here he goes, wasting the precious few vials he has left on thinking about love. He abhors Christmas, specifically because it always makes him think of useless stupidities like this, slowing down the work. In fact, everything seems to be slowing down, now. The tree is… glowing. Everything is glowing. This doesn’t usually happen. He has experiments he could be thinking of, mind palace maintenance, crimes to solve –

He nearly falls off the sofa when the door to his dingy flat crashes open and two paramedics force their way in. He feels the crystalline beauty and clarity of everything shatter into glass as they stomp towards the sofa and pick him up by the armpits, and that’s when he realizes he’d already been on the floor. He feels one of them wipe away the sweat that is dripping down his face as they drag him towards the door, and that’s when everything starts to feel cold. Cold in an interesting way, cold in a way that he wants to analyze… but no, they’re dragging him towards the door, and _where are they taking him_? He knows, Mycroft has finally cracked under the pressure and is going to have him killed, and he is strangely at peace with that, but what if that’s not where they’re taking him? Everything is so cold, he can’t think through the iceberg that his mind has become, and then Mycroft appears at the door, umbrella in hand, pointing it towards the small calendar his idiotic landlord has put up near the door (December 2008, _unimportant_ ). Sherlock thrashes in the arms of the paramedics, sweat dripping from his curls.

“Mycroft! _Where are they taking me, I’m trying to analyze the cold, will I be slaughtered quickly or slowly which do you prefer, my mind is ice everything is ice, why won’t they let me analyze the cold_ –”

He feels an injection in his neck and doesn’t even have time to consider what it might be before he’s collapsing into the paramedics’ arms.

Mycroft reaches over and strokes his little brother’s arm as the paramedics load him into the ambulance. He knows Sherlock can’t hear him, but he leans over and whispers it anyway. “We have to stop this nasty habit of yours of overdosing on Christmas, little brother. This time I will personally make sure that you stay in rehab.”

The ambulance doors shut behind them, and Mycroft spends his fourth Christmas in a row saving his brother from himself.


End file.
